A blog on various topics in C++ programming including language features, standards, idioms, design patterns, functional, and OO programming.

Saturday, April 29, 2006

Some C/C++ standards trivia

"Maximal munch" rule of C++ compiler tokenizer causes ">>" token to be indentified as a right shift operator. Basically, the tokenizer tries to match a string with longest possible "known" token. Because of this, in nested templates, X<Y<int>> can't be parsed sensibly as the ">>" is not split into two ">" (as desired by programmer). A simple solution is to put a space between two consecutive ">"s. This would have otherwise required context sensitive parsing. But C++0x standard promises to relieve programmers from this seemling vexing parse of C++. One of the few language changes in C++0x is to allow "X<Y<int>>!

Another addition is "extern template", which provides a syntax for telling the compiler that a specific template instantiation will be provided somewhere else. For more information please see: DDJ - More News From the Front

C99 standard defines a new (not new anymore) keyword "restrict". The restrict keyword tells a compiler that the specified pointer is the only way to access a given piece of data. This can allow the compiler to optimize aggressively. The restrict keyword is a bit confusing because it applies to the pointer itself rather than the data the pointer points to (contrast const int *x and int *restrict x). I think C++ still does not have this keyword like many other things in C99 (for example, variable size arrays!!)